Faculty

Responding to recent tragic events involving African-Americans and police officers, the faculty of Arizona State University’s School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (SCCJ) published an open letter offering 10 far-ranging recommendations for systemic change in the relationships between law enforcement agencies and the communities they serve.

In the United States, managing the tensions between the privileged, politically dominant classes of society and its politically, socially and economically disadvantaged classes, to which communities of color have disproportionately belonged, has always been a central concern of police and the criminal justice system. Some U.S. police agencies were explicitly established in the Civil War era to help preserve slavery and white supremacy.

The premature death of George Floyd at the hands of a Minneapolis police officer caught on video May 25 raises questions as to how a call to investigate a person suspected of forgery can end up in tragedy.

In the graphic footage recorded by a bystander, a handcuffed Floyd is on the ground, face-down, and struggles to breathe as one of three officers holding him down forces his knee on Floyd’s neck for several minutes while ignoring pleas from the 46-year-old man and onlookers to stop.

The logistical challenges of teaching a class inside a state prison are complicated enough during a typical semester, let alone one that includes a pandemic.

This spring, an Arizona State University professor and a doctoral student were instructing 10 students based at the Downtown Phoenix campus, plus 10 more who happen to be men serving criminal sentences at the Arizona State Prison Complex-Florence.

There’s nothing like seeing professionals doing what they do where they actually do it to motivate a student toward making a satisfying career choice. Just ask Cassity Sopha, a junior in Watts College of Public Service and Community Solutions’ School of Criminology and Criminal Justice (CCJ).

Karla Chicuate was intellectually acquainted with the morally evil practice of grooming, abducting and selling human beings for labor or sexual exploitation when she traveled in January to west Africa.

After all, she had been working as an educator with the city of Tempe’s Sexual Relationship and Violence Department for about a year and a half when her 10-day excursion began, and she intentionally chose the assignment to work with women and children who had endured human trafficking.

A book co-written by an ASU professor about how inequalities in the criminal justice system have roots in bail and pretrial detention issues has been recognized by the Vera Institute of Justice as one of its best books of 2019.